At first I
thought Courrier Sud (or Southern Mail) was just a story about a pilot, maybe a
kind of Exupéry’s autobiographical story, but I was completely wrong! Like The
Little Prince, this is a philosophical thinking which Exupéry has wrapped in a
simple story about the life and love of a pilot named Jacques Bernis. Bernis’s
job is to carry express mail from Paris to Dakkar (this is a new innovation
because at that time mail were delivered by train). Plane and navigation were
new at that time, and it needed a big courage for a man to drive a plane.
Ordinary people even mocked Bernis as ‘ghost’ or ‘wizard’. Travelling on air
was beyond many people’s common sense.

On the other
hand, Bernis felt that ordinary life was unbearable; life which was limited by orders
and routines. Exupéry emphasized the different way of thinking by creating a
love story of Bernis and a girl from his childhood named Geneviève. Unlike
Bernis, Geneviève loved orders and formalities; that when Bernis asked her to
runaway with him from her previous unhappy life, Geneviève found it too
difficult because she has already bound to her home and everything she
possessed, that she could not live freely as Bernis wanted.

I saw Bernis
as a lonely person, he did belong to the world he supposed to live, and only
when he was alone in his cockpit that he felt quiet and absorbed in the beauty
of nature. I believe that in those occasions, Bernis actually felt the presence
of God through His creation. Bernis also felt that everything in ordinary life
was stagnant, never changed.

From
Courrier Sud I learned—not only about the unreliability of the planes at that
time, the dangers of being a pilot, and the beautiful scenes from above—but also
a divine knowledge of living our life. Instead of limited ourselves with
everything that modern life offers us, we should provide more time to
contemplate the true meaning of it; to be more like Bernis than like
Geneviève. And all of these were beautifully crafted by Exupéry in poetic
sentences, makes me love this book more!

I give four
stars for Courrier Sud, for although I know this is a remarkable work, there
are still several parts of the story that I could not get into the exact
meaning. Maybe that's why I love it, because I know I can go back to this book some
day and maybe next time I’ll be able to extract new meanings from it. Maybe…